Huckabee? More Like Suckabee, Am I Right?

The word “likable” gets thrown around a lot when we talk about politicians, but man, was Mike Huckabee ever likable in 2008. His pet cause wasn’t abortion or defense, but fighting child obesity with Bill Clinton. He was overtly Christian, but he didn’t seem to be the judgmental kind—you got the sense that he really was compassionate towards us sinners. He made a campaign commercial with Chuck Norris! He plays bass! He wasn’t exactly “hip”—he’s a conservative politician from Arkansas, after all—but he didn’t seem “evil,” the way Dick Cheney was evil. I disagree with probably every single position Huckabee articulated (except for the anti-obesity stuff), but that’s because I’m a godless sex-and-drug-loving New York liberal. Still, I felt like the two of us could have sit down over a non-fat yogurt and had a good chat about football.

So my question is, what the fuck is wrong with Mike Huckabee lately?

Last week, Huckabee made some comments about how Obama grew up in Kenya—which is just factually wrong, and seems like a nod to the “birther” or “nutjob” part of the Republican coalition, which believes that Obama was born in Kenya because ????. It was an especially weird thing to say because Obama did spend some of his early years in Muslim-dominated Indonesia, and you’d think that bringing that up and implying that Obama had his mind poisoned by Islamists would be enough. Huckabee backtracked by saying he “misspoke,” which didn’t make any sense because he talked about the Mau Mau Revolution and the British, which are specific to Kenya, not Indonesia. His explanation is like someone getting blackout drunk and throwing all up over your couch and then saying, “Sorry man, I tripped.”

Let’s assume Huckabee was not being stupid or drunk when he said that stuff on the radio; let’s further assume that he intends to make a serious run for the Republican nomination—even though neither of these things are certainties. What the fuck could he have been thinking?



1. He’s the “Christian candidate” in the race, so he wants to get some of the hard-C-Conservative-but-soft-c-christian voters (the paranoid Beckians who think Obama is Stalin or whatever) that support Sarah Palin. Except he already leads the field among birthers, so why go out of his way to appeal to them?

2. He is actually an incredibly savvy politician who is willing to sacrifice himself for the greater good of the GOP. He figures that even though polls show him and Mitt Romney running about the same versus Obama, the tall, handsome, and sorta-moderate (for a Republican in 2012) Romney has a better chance of winning in the general election. So Huckabee is purposely marginalizing himself by making wacky comments about Obama and Natalie Portman. He’ll still be the Christian candidate, and he’ll get the nod to be the Vice-Presidential candidate—a Romeny-Huckabee ticket would probably have the best chance of beating Obama.

That second option would make sense if I explained it using chalkboards and tied it to the Koch brothers somehow, like a Bizarro Glenn Beck, but really, Huckabee could just throw his support to Romney at a critical point in the primary if he wanted to be VP. So it was just a gaffe, the kind of gaffe that Huckabee wasn’t making in 2008. I’m still confused by the whole incident. Did he really think that Obama grew up in Kenya? Maybe he wouldn’t be fun to sit down with after all.

BONUS ATTACK ON HUCKABEE AKA FUCKABEE AKA SUCKABEE:
This fine Politico article on Huckabee and Israel—he’s a Christian Zionist, which I guess is like being a reverse Jew for Jesus—includes this bit near the end:

Some pro-Israel Jews view with suspicion Christian Zionists like Huckabee because of the belief among some fundamentalist Christians that gathering the Jews in the Holy Land will precipitate the Second Coming and the end of the world.

Huckabee wouldn’t directly describe his view on that belief but dismissed it as irrelevant.

Here’s a good question for Huckabee: Why is it so hard to say, “No, I am not supporting certain policies because I believe they will bring about the end of the world.”? You would think that “Not wanting to literally destroy the planet” would be a position that every Presidential candidate, regardless of party, would want to endorse. Jesus Christ, how many Christians that are actively hankering for the Rapture can there be for Huckabee to want to avoid offending them? Let’s be clear on something: HE DECLINED TO DESCRIBE HIS VIEW ON THE END OF THE WORLD. I don’t think that’s irrelevant.

Immediately following that bit excerpted above, Huckabee is quoted as saying, “The reason this, as an American, matters to me is because freedom and liberty matter to me,” which the Palestinians would find odd—but more importantly, he says, “as an American,” possibly implying that “as a Christian” he supports Israel for different reasons, well…

I usually try to avoid fearmongering, but, what the heck.

UNTIL HE SAYS OTHERWISE, ASSUME THAT HUCKABEE WANTS TO BRING ABOUT THE RAPTURE. HE WANTS TO DESTROY THE WORLD. HE’S LIKE A SUPERVILLIAN. IF HE IS THE REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE, THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WILL BE THE PARTY OF THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE AND HUCKABEE’S AMERICA WILL BE RULED BY THE BOOK OF REVEALATION!

Kinda makes Romney's modest jobs-based campaign seem not so bad, huh? Read more!

Things that don't Suck: The Larry Sanders Show

I wrote something over at Splitsider, a blog that takes comedy very seriously, about the Larry Sanders Show, an HBO sitcom from the 90s that laid the foundation for the next 20 years of 30-minute comedy shows. The show was one of the first not to have a live audience or laugh track and--well, just read thing if you want to find out, alright? I don't give a shit. Here's a clip of the show:
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Why Larry King Sucks

I wrote a letter to Larry King on this website. I hope he reads it! Or, I hope his assistant reads it to him. Read more!

Why Complaining About How There's no Good Men Sucks

Hey, did you think that the well of “20-somethings-represent-a-whole-new-paradigm-for-adulthood-and-the-way-we-live” newspaper articles was empty after that long sorta-expose the New York Times did last year? Well, the Wall Street Journal doesn’t think so—they just published this long piece by Kay Hymowitz that at this moment has 47,000 Facebook likes and 1,100 comments. Hymowitz talks about all the stuff the Times article talks about (young people are undergoing extended periods of adolescence and not getting married, buying a house, and/or starting a career right after college, etc.) but adds her own little twist—in an endearing combination of feminism and reactionary traditionalism, she complains that this “pre-adulthood” is hurting women, because all the men are too immature to be long-term relationship material. Or as she puts it:

Among pre-adults, women are the first sex. They graduate from college in greater numbers (among Americans ages 25 to 34, 34% of women now have a bachelor's degree but just 27% of men), and they have higher GPAs. As most professors tell it, they also have more confidence and drive. These strengths carry women through their 20s, when they are more likely than men to be in grad school and making strides in the workplace. In a number of cities, they are even out-earning their brothers and boyfriends.

Still, for these women, one key question won't go away: Where have the good men gone? Their male peers often come across as aging frat boys, maladroit geeks or grubby slackers—a gender gap neatly crystallized by the director Judd Apatow in his hit 2007 movie "Knocked Up."

The immature, Apatow-movie-watching, maladroit geek in me wants to snark back with something like, “Where have all the good men gone, Kay? Away from you as fast as fucking possible, that’s for sure!” Then I’d high-five my grubby slacker buddy and we’d go right back to playing Left 4 Dead, snacking on salty, chemically-flavored chips, and periodically taking bong hits.

But you know what? I’m a fucking adult, so let’s actually talk about Hymowitz’s ideas. Perhaps because it’s is adapted from her book, the article is sort of confusing: after telling us about the dangerously low supply of good men in America, she backs away and discusses the formation of “pre-adulthood” in a gender-neutral way. It takes longer to get a good, stable job in today’s market—you have to go to college, and probably bounce around a few jobs before you have something you can properly call a “career.” People’s age at the time of their first marriage has been rising steadily since the 70s. And the media—oh, those bastards!—are encouraging our young men to remain barely-sentient towers of meat who giggle at fart jokes. Hymowitz blames the lack of good dating options for heterosexual women on Maxim, Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, Spike TV, Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, Steve Carell, and Seth Rogen.


As much as I like the idea of a bunch of frat-humor outlets teaming up with Hollywood and advertisers to keep men dumb and single so they have disposable income to spend on body spray and fancy booze and video games, I think it’s probably more likely that being a grubby guffawing boor makes you read Maxim and watch Adam Sandler movies than the other way around.

To deal with the other pieces of Hymowitz’s narrative: people aren’t getting married as much as they were in the 50s and 60s, and that’s probably a good thing. Women couldn’t earn as much as men, so it made sense for them to land a fella and become housewives as soon as possible. Now that women can have careers, they do have careers and don’t get married so young. Another explanation for the marriage age rising, courtesy of Matt Yglesias: “Maybe this number just bounces around over time and it’s always been the case that some people are sometimes frustrated with some members of the opposite sex.”

Anecdotally, I would say that there are plenty of 20-somethings who follow the guidelines given to them by the trend pieces. But an upper class of shiftless layabouts who aren’t employed at anything in particular is nothing new. Remember the dandies or whatever in England, or wherever the dandies were? (They were probably invented by trend article writers too.) Remember Baudelaire, a prominent proto-pre-adult?

Hymowitz probably wouldn’t consider Baudelaire marriage material, what with the syphilis and the drug addiction and all. But he doesn’t match the description of the archetypal pre-adult man that she uses in her concluding paragraph: “Relatively affluent, free of family responsibilities, and entertained by an array of media devoted to his every pleasure, the single young man can live in pig heaven—and often does.”

Nor does that description match anyone I’ve ever met, except for maybe my dorm neighbor my freshman year, who would literally lie in bed eating candy and playing video games. Even the men I know who have moved back home with their parents, or are unemployed for long periods of time, or are chronically single, aren’t the kind of shiftless hedonists of the sort that Hymowitz is convinced are replacing the “good men,” Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style.

I’m not a woman, or an old person, but weren’t good men always hard to find? Wasn’t that the whole point of the saying, “A good man is hard to find”? Now that women can become successful for themselves and don’t need to latch onto a man—anything with a penis and a paycheck—for the sake of long-term security, they can take their time and pick out a man to share a life and a house and chromosomes with. Picking out a romantic partner can be pretty complicated, especially when you have high standards, and especially when you have to find someone who will love you back. That’s tricky! Maybe you’ll like someone and they won’t like you, or someone will like you and you’ll be in a relationship, or you’ll really like each other but one of you has to move across the country—both of you being hard-charging professional types—and thus, leaves the other behind. Love is complicated, as pop music has taught me. It’s complicated and hard, and you don’t have to invent bullshit pop-sociological reasons for why the guys who are around you are losers.

Where Have all the Good Men Gone? [WSJ]

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Why Fashion Week Sucks: An Event Diary

There’s a girl dressed in all black checking names off a list when you walk in. If your name is on the list you get to go to the second floor in a tiny elevator. You can ask, but you are not allowed to go up the stairs. A woman in a fur coat tells the girl she’s with something called Fitz, with a z, and spells it out. Other girls dressed in black hurry out of the door and onto the dark street on some kind of important errand.

Upstairs, the elevator opens into a small, softly lit room. People are gradually filling it up, waiting for something to happen and getting complimentary vodka drinks mixed by two more girls in black. They carefully combine ice, juice, tonic, and a certain brand of vodka on a table at one end of the room, while a movie in black and white is projected onto the curtains behind them. All of the people working at this event are wearing all black and all are conventionally pretty young women. Many of the women and men spilling from the tiny elevator in bunches are conventionally pretty; some have foreign accents. There’s an animal skull on the wall. It’s impossible to tell what movie is playing because it’s on mute and the folds of the curtain distort the image.

The people are not watching the movie. They are mostly talking about the places they have been, the people they know who aren’t here. Introductions are made over the generic thumping dance music floating in from somewhere. “I actually tweeted you,” a man with long blond hair says to an older woman with impeccably painted red nails. Conversational clusters form. If you aren’t part of a cluster, you stand against the wall with your drink and look around at the other clusterless people. Or you get out your phone and stare at its blue glow—many people are doing that. “I’ve been to a few parties here,” a stylish young man tells his cluster of other stylish young men. “There were all these guys coming out of the bathroom together.”

Everyone in the increasingly crowded room is stylish. It’s unclear who is waiting in line to get another drink and who is trapped by the crush of people. A nervous-looking guy in a zebra-striped shirt keeps going back to the vodka table. Whatever is supposed to happen hasn’t started happening yet. The black-clad vodka girls use a new cup for every drink until they run out of cups. “Who does your color?” says someone waiting for a drink to someone else.

The elevator doors open, deposit more people, and close. This keeps happening. A woman makes a distressed noise and starts hitting the closing door like a prisoner pleading with her jailer. “Her boyfriend,” someone says knowingly. Finally the doors open and she stumbles in. Someone asks about if there’s a bathroom here or what and no one knows.

A signal has been made; knowledge of the next stage of this event passes through the crowd. A door opens and people press towards it in an orderly but eager fashion, like children queuing for a mall Santa. There are complimentary cans of ice tea on a table near the door but no one takes them. The generic dance music gets louder as the people surge into the next room. This is where the event will take place.

The center of the new room is occupied by a narrow raised platform covered in brown construction paper. There are chairs to either side labeled with numbers and letters, and if you have a seat assignment you sit down, elbow-to-elbow with the other seated people. Is a chair a sign of status? The others stand, crowding each other all the way back to the wall. A pretty girl in black is sitting at a podium doing something on a computer; maybe she’s controlling the music. Everyone is getting out cameras and cell phones with cameras in them. A video camera on a tripod is set at the foot of the platform.

More pretty girls in black come and take the construction paper away, and the narrow black platform shines like a freshly polished shoe. People type words into their phones, bring up menus, communicate over social networking platforms.. A man walks across the platform, leaving footprints of dust. The crowd grumbles at him—“He just did that?”—and the people nearest the platform wipe off the footprints with napkins and sleeves.

A hidden door slides open at the head of the platform and smoke or fog from an unseen machine comes billowing out. The music gets louder, more urgent, and everyone sits forward in their chairs, preparing their cameras. Without an introduction, a man strides down the platform wearing a full-length coat that looks like it’s made out of furry intestines. Gasps are heard. He stops for a split second at the foot of the platform then turns and walks away. Another man takes his place immediately, wearing a waist-length version of the same coat, then he goes back into the foggy opening.

Men are walking down the platform one by one, in a very organized way. Some of them wear makeup, one has a black mask on. They all look very similar; if they weren’t all dressed differently you might think they were the same man. Everyone takes photos of the men all the time, but they don’t stop to pose. They look like they want to get this over with as fast as possible. One wears a jacket with feathers, another has no shirt, another wears a shirt that exposes his stomach. “Look at the footwear!” someone says.

It is over faster than you would think. At the end all the men come out at once in a single-file line, walking up and down the platform as a group to the crowd’s applause. It’s like they’re proving that they all are different men, like they are displaying the end result of a complicated magic trick. A man in all black, like a stagehand, appears out of the fog and there is more applause. No one makes a speech or explains anything. There is nothing to explain, or it’s like that quote about jazz, if you have to ask you’ll never know. Everyone here knows.

The rush to get out the door begins. Some people push through the crowd searching for the vodka table, wondering if it’s still open for business. Others are talking about other places to go, upcoming events, past events this has reminded them of. The phones come out again. The elevator doors open and close, taking people downstairs now instead of up. Outside the street is lit up with headlights and neon. Some guys are standing at a closed loading dock smoking weed. Plastic bags are carried over the sidewalk by the wind. Women pull the collars of their fur coats up, their high heels clacking on the pavement.

(Image ripped off from Oakazine) Read more!